ICPsimp ☁️∞

Just love me some good tech and innovation. $ICP

But I don't know shit about shit.

Just here to provide out of touch takes.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

If something like the Internet Computer Protocol doesn’t succeed, I don’t see how Web3, crypto, DeFi… or even parts of Web2 don’t start to fall apart.

Because the same problem exists everywhere.

Web2 is built on complex, fragile infrastructure, heavily dependent on third-party vendors, constantly expanding the attack surface.

“Web3” is mostly built on top of that same infrastructure.

So all the dependencies, all the attack surfaces, all the vulnerabilities… they never actually go away.

And we’re already seeing it. Cybercrime is rising fast.

Hacks. Exploits. Drains. Data breaches. Constantly.

Now add AI into that equation:
faster attacks
automated exploits
scalable cybercrime

Traditional cybersecurity can't keep up.
At some point, it breaks.

People stop trusting DeFi
Systems fail more often
Breaches increase
And everything built on that foundation gets exposed

If the foundation doesn’t change, nothing else matters.

This isn’t just a Web3 problem.

It’s an internet infrastructure problem.

The solution is actually pretty simple:

A less complex, more unified web stack
Fewer dependencies
Smaller attack surface
Apps running in a tamper-resistant environment

The Internet Computer Protocol

https://t.co/Z5o06JWeNf

Data source: https://t.co/9ki74dgiCJ

[Cloud Foundation ☁️ @BobbyO_]

@coc_space This is what’s wrong with Cardano ⬇️

Too much fragmentation. Too many dependencies. Too slow at the network level.

The hybrid/Web2.5 model just inherits all the problems of Web2.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

@BobbyO_ @F_Gregaard Lol

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

@HHorsley ICP + Cloud Engines

Even bigger. The World is coming on-chain.

$ICP ∞ ☁️

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

@HHorsley ICP + Cloud Engines

Even bigger. The World is coming on-chain.

$ICP ∞ ☁️

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

Dear ICP community, the Internet Computer has now been running strong for 5 years 👏👏👏

Here is a celebratory preview of ICP "cloud engines," the sovereign frontier cloud technology the network shall soon provide from https://t.co/D5Dfj44BmO.

Main points:

— Cloud engines enable anyone to spin up their own sovereign frontier cloud. The technology involves an extraordinary inventive step, in which cloud is created from a mathematically secure network of nodes. The nodes run as part of the Internet Computer network (https://t.co/ptsshOm9nj) but are selected and configured by the cloud engine's owner.

— The frontier cloud provided by engines is strongly focused on enabling AI agents to build and update online applications and services for us. The world is changing fast, and nearly all new online apps and services are already being built with the help of AI, and thus cloud engines target the future of cloud.

— Software hosted on cloud engines is tamperproof, which means that it is immune to infrastructure hacks, because it runs inside a mathematically secure network protocol, rather than on computers directly. This means that AI agents, and those building with them, don't need to have a security team in the loop, or to trust someone else's security team. This is crucial, because in the future, non technical people will demand the freedom to build with full automation — where they just need to issue instructions to AI about what to build, and don't need to worry about anything or anyone else. Of course, apps and services running on engines are also vastly safer from the new breed of hacker being enabled by frontier AI.

(The cloud engines themselves are also "tamperproof." Even if a hacker gains physical access to some portion of a cloud engine's nodes, and can make arbitrary changes, the computations and data of the hosted apps and services cannot be corrupted or interrupted so long as the network's fault bounds aren't exceeded. The recent hack of Vercel, a major cloud platform, which gave hackers access to the apps it hosted, provides additional perspective on the importance of this advantage.)

— Software hosted on cloud engines is guaranteed to run, so long as a sufficient number of the engine's nodes are running. This means that AI can build applications and services without the need to have a human systems admin team constantly tinkering with the underlying platform to keep it running, which is again crucial, because in the future, non technical people will expect the freedom to use AI to build without the support of others.

— New frontier programming language technology, in the form of the Motoko language developed by Caffeine Labs, leverages seminal "orthogonal persistence" technology that unifies program logic and data to deliver further unlocks for AI (Motoko is the first computer language being developed that targets agents that are writing software rather than humans engineers per se). Nowadays, AI can build and update production apps at a prodigious rate, even at the speed of conversation. But it can also make mistakes, and there's a risk that an update it creates might be "lossy" in the sense it causes some transformed data to be lost. Again, in this new world, it's both undesirable and impractical for everyone to have to have a systems admin team on-hand to detect lossy updates and roll them back, but Motoko provides a solution: it can detect new software updates are lossy before they are applied, reducing potentially catastrophic errors by AI to harmless coding retries.

— Software hosted on cloud engines is "serverless" but unlike traditional serverless software, directly it directly incorporates data through "orthogonal persistence." Another key purpose is simplify backend software logic and fuel the modeling power of AI by increasing abstraction (sorry for the technical language!!!). Put simply, this enables AI to produce more sophisticated backends, faster, and at dramatically lower costs, as measured by the number AI API tokens consumed during coding. (Tip for the technical: orthogonal persistence is a new paradigm where "the program is the database," and data lives inside program variables, which is possible because it's as if hosted software runs forever in persistent memory).

— An expanding database of skills at https://t.co/lloVYiGYs8 shall make it possible to develop and directly deploy apps and services to your cloud engines directly from Claude Code, Perplexity, Codex and other AI platforms. Further, your account on https://t.co/IfQrVovF3L can be connected, so that new apps and updates created through conversation automatically appear hosted from your cloud engine. In the future, R&D is going to be very seamless. You converse with AI, and your secure and unstoppable apps or services are created or updated. Cloud engines are designed to directly support this "self-writing cloud" future where we can work hands-free.

— Tech sovereignty is becoming a huge issue worldwide, with governments and corporations seeking to create sovereign tech stacks owing to geopolitical tensions. Increasingly, people are realizing that tech provided by foreign nations can come with hidden backdoors and kills switches, from the base platform, right up through hosted apps and services. ICP technology is open source, and those building on ICP using AI own their own source code. When you have the source code, you can verify that there are no backdoors, and when you own the source code thanks to AI, you can update it at will, freeing you from vendor lock-in. But cloud engines take sovereignty much further...

— You create a cloud engine by selecting the nodes that will be combined. You can choose the class of nodes used, and their number, but more importantly, you can choose who operates the nodes, and where they are located. Almost any configuration is possible, because the Internet Computer scales the security privileges afforded to hosted software within the network according to configuration (software hosted on cloud engines can directly interoperate with software on other engines and traditional subnets, but base restrictions are applied according to security rules). A cloud engine can be created within a region such as Europe, to comply with regs such as GDPR, or completely within a sovereign state like Switzerland or Pakistan. But cloud engines go further still...

— Sovereignty is also about freedom from vendor lock-in. Cloud engines are essentially ICP (Internet Computer Protocol) network configurations, and this means the underlying compute nodes they combine can be swapped out without interrupting their hosted apps and services. This is a big deal. In addition, cloud engines now support nodes that are instances running on Big Tech's clouds, in addition to nodes that are dedicated specialized hardware, as per the Gen I and Gen II nodes that dominate the Internet Computer today. For example, it is possible to have an engine running across different AWS data centers, say, and then reconfigure the engine to run across a mixture of AWS, Google, Azure and Hetzner for even more resilience, without the users of hosted apps and services noticing a thing. That's true freedom.

— Sovereign AI is becoming increasingly important too, and cloud engines allow special "AI nodes" to be added to them, so that hosted software can perform inference on hardware provisioned by the owner from a location the owner has selected. Even though the AI nodes are only accessible within the cloud engine, they can still benefit from the forthcoming Internet Intelligence Gateway (IG), which will make it possible to validate inference performed on key frontier open weights LLMs, even when the inference is performed on completely independent AI clouds. When the results of inference are received, this technology can verify that neither the prompt+context (input) nor the inference result (output) have been modified, and that the results were produced by the precise LLM expected. This ensures that AI clouds don't cheat by running inference on cheaper models than are being paid for, and bad actors aren't modifying the inputs or outputs to surreptitiously insert advertising into results, say, or change facts, or insert malware when code is being generated. What's super cool about this technology is the cost of the verification is scalable. A very valuable additional security can be achieved with only 1-2% of extra cost.

— Scaling apps and services when they hit capacity limits is another thorny problem that cloud engines help the world address. Engines make scaling possible without rewriting or reconfiguring software. The query workload capacity of hosted software can be horizontally scaled simply by adding new nodes to an engine, and nodes can also be added in geographical proximity to demand. Meanwhile, update workload capacity can first be scaled-up by swapping an engine's nodes out for the next class up, and then when no larger class of node is available, horizontally scaled-out by "splitting" the engine into two, which doubles available capacity. (Technical tip: horizontally scaling update capacity by splitting engines requires multi-canister architectures).

— For those who have been following how Caffeine builds apps that can efficiently store large numbers of files, I should mention that apps built on cloud engines will also support the new ICP Blob Storage cloud network (since cloud engines currently have up to about 3 TB of memory, which apps storing large amounts of files can easily exceed). We are also working on allowing blob storage nodes to be added to cloud engines, to enable sovereign mass blob storage within an engine, similarly to how AI nodes can be added currently.

— Lastly, but certainly not least, I should mention that cloud engines are multi-blockchain capable, and ready for digital assets, thanks to the clever math at their core. For example, an e-commerce service built on a cloud engine can securely accept and custody stablecoin payments, or a multi-chain DEX could be hosted. Further, engines can support software autonomy (software orchestrated and controlled by other autonomous software, in a decentralized way) and can themselves be orchestrated by SNS technology, and thus run autonomously too.

Today, though, the focus is on *mainstream* cloud. This year, the cloud industry will generate approximately one trillion dollars in revenue. That number is already huge, but is expected to grow to two trillion dollars by 2030.

After years of continuous development, which have seen more than $500m spent on R&D, the Internet Computer network is now tacking directly toward this mainstream cloud market with cloud engine technology.

In their first version, cloud engines are not meant to be a cloud panacea. For example, currently they are not ideal for working with big data. You should use something like DataBricks for that.

Cloud engines are carefully targeted at enabling AI to produce traditional online applications and services, including SaaS, in a safer and more productive way, which represents a new market segment with tremendous potential. Of course, DFINITY will continue to work relentlessly to push forward ICP's capabilities, so expect further developments.

It's worth mentioning that this cloud segment isn't just about creating new apps and services using AI, it's also about replacing legacy systems and apps built on super expensive SaaS services. Caffeine Labs is working to produce technology (Caffeine Snorkel) that can study an enterprise's legacy systems and app built on SaaS, create replacement systems and apps, and migrate the data, while supporting key stakeholders through the process over email and chat, with full automation. Thus the legacy systems and SaaS markets shall also be addressed by cloud engines.

Zooming out, and reasoning in a more metaphysical way, we believe, as we always have, that there is room for a new kind of cloud created by mathematical networks, that provides seminal advances in the fields of security and resilience, as well as true sovereignty and freedom from lock-in. That this same technology, with the help of additional technologies like orthogonal persistence and Motoko, enables AI to build for us without the need for so much oversight, and to create more backend sophistication while consuming fewer AI API tokens, enables ICP to bring game-changing advances to the world.

Cloud engines will work synergistically with the Intelligence Gateway, which will enable apps and services running on engines to seamlessly leverage AI, wherever that AI is running, while providing verifiability at extremely low cost for open weights frontier models.

We believe that cloud engines represent an inflection point in the storied history of the Internet Computer project, and I'm very proud to be sharing the details with you on the network's fifth birthday 💪

I'll be back with more news soon!!

[BSCN @BSCNews]

ICP's Caffeine v3 Has Recorded Huge Growth Since Launch

Internet Computer (@Dfinity) reported a 20% month-over-month surge in subscribers following the deployment of the Caffeine V3 parallel development engine.

This release marks a significant scaling milestone for the $ICP ecosystem as it transitions toward a fully autonomous AI Agent Economy.

The protocol's native asset is also up by 16% in the past 24 hours.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

@Onafhankelijke2 @msuiche Well it is an honest question. The Internet Computer Protocol is a solid solution to a lot of issues. People just get turned off by the idea because it's a blockchain. Which I get because the entire space is, what he said, garbage.

[Coin Bureau @coinbureau]

🚨 JUST IN: $TSR/USDT WIPED OUT AFTER REPORTED $2.5M EXPLOIT

PeckShieldAlert, citing Specter, reports that an exploiter minted and dumped 99M $TSR on BNB Chain.

The exploiter then swapped the stolen funds for ~2.5M $USDT, bridged to Ethereum, and routed 1,285.5 $ETH through Tornado Cash.

$TSR/USDT plunged nearly 100% to $0.0002 in a day.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

This is exactly why so many people still think blockchain is a scam.

The entire industry keeps telling people that DeFi, tokenization, and moving money around is the future, yet every week there's another exploit, another protocol drain, another bridge hack, or another project getting wiped out.

For 99% of blockchains, the primary use case is moving tokens around.

And apparently we can't even do that safely.

This is starting to look a lot like the dot-com bubble.

Everyone saw the promise. Everyone assumed thousands of companies would win. Everyone assumed every internet company had a future.

Most of them didn't.

The useful companies survived.

The ones solving real problems survived.

The ones creating real value survived.

I think blockchain is heading toward the same moment.

Most projects won't make it.

Most chains won't make it.

Most tokens won't make it.

The projects that survive will be the ones providing meaningful utility beyond speculation and beyond simply moving tokens from one wallet to another.

That's why I think the future belongs to projects extending blockchain to the broader internet stack itself.

Applications.

Data.

Storage.

Compute.

AI.

Identity.

Actual services people use.

Platforms that reduce complexity, improve security, improve sovereignty, and give users ownership over their software and data.

Whether that's ICP or something else, I think that's where the real value ultimately ends up.

The dot-com crash didn't kill the internet.

It killed the companies that didn't matter.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

This is exactly why so many people still think blockchain is a scam.

The entire industry keeps telling people that DeFi, tokenization, and moving money around is the future, yet every week there's another exploit, another protocol drain, another bridge hack, or another project getting wiped out.

For 99% of blockchains, the primary use case is moving tokens around.

And apparently we can't even do that safely.

This is starting to look a lot like the dot-com bubble.

Everyone saw the promise. Everyone assumed thousands of companies would win. Everyone assumed every internet company had a future.

Most of them didn't.

The useful companies survived.

The ones solving real problems survived.

The ones creating real value survived.

I think blockchain is heading toward the same moment.

Most projects won't make it.

Most chains won't make it.

Most tokens won't make it.

The projects that survive will be the ones providing meaningful utility beyond speculation and beyond simply moving tokens from one wallet to another.

That's why I think the future belongs to projects extending blockchain to the broader internet stack itself.

Applications.

Data.

Storage.

Compute.

AI.

Identity.

Actual services people use.

Platforms that reduce complexity, improve security, improve sovereignty, and give users ownership over their software and data.

Whether that's ICP or something else, I think that's where the real value ultimately ends up.

The dot-com crash didn't kill the internet.

It killed the companies that didn't matter.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

This is starting to look a lot like the dot-com bubble.

We're literally watching it happen in real time through endless hacks, exploits, protocol drains, bridge failures, and security failures.

Just like the dot-com era, most projects won't survive.

The projects that solve real problems, provide real services, and create real value will be the ones left standing.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

@msuiche Honest question? Why?

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

Cybersecurity needs better architecture, not more patches.

This npm supply chain attack is a perfect example. A compromised package gets published, a developer installs it, a hidden preinstall hook executes, credentials are stolen, and the malware spreads. According to Microsoft's report, the payload was able to steal GitHub tokens, AWS credentials, SSH keys, npm credentials, and then propagate itself further into the software supply chain.

This wasn't just a malware problem. It was a trust-model problem.

The attack depended on mutable package registries, automatic code execution, centralized package distribution, credential sprawl, and a long chain of trust assumptions that most developers never even think about until something goes wrong.

Could malicious code still be deployed on ICP? Yeah.

But ICP fundamentally changes the trust model and architecture. Code can be deployed as immutable, verifiable canisters, reducing reliance on mutable package registries, centralized trust assumptions, and traditional software distribution models.

You can then layer additional controls on top, such as https://t.co/9ZomqMvoMX for multi-party approval workflows instead of trusting a single maintainer or CI key, VetKeys and threshold cryptography to reduce credential exposure and single points of failure, and tamper-resistant execution where code and state are protected by the protocol itself.

ICP doesn't magically make malware impossible.

The point is that attacks like this succeed because modern software supply chains are built on fragile trust assumptions, centralized infrastructure, and credential sprawl. ICP reduces many of those assumptions and raises the cost of compromise.

At some point we need to stop asking how to patch these systems and start asking whether the architecture itself needs to change.

That's where cybersecurity needs to go next.

[Microsoft Threat Intelligence @MsftSecIntel]

Microsoft has identified a npm supply chain compromise impacting 90+ redhat-cloud-services/* packages, including patch-client 4.0.4, insights-client 4.0.4, rbac-client 9.0.3, host-inventory-client 5.0.3, frontend-components 7.7.2, and others. The payload is a self-propagating worm that infects other npm packages and self-publishes.

Each compromised package adds a malicious preinstall hook, embedding an index.js script in the package.json that silently executes “node index.js” during installation, downloads Bun, and runs a payload that steals secrets from npm, GitHub, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Secure Shell (SSH). The added code bloats index.js from ~8KB to ~4.3MB, acting as a heavily obfuscated ROT-9 eval loader.

If any of the compromised packages are installed, users and organizations should assume compromise, rotate credentials, revert to a previously trusted version, and block compromised packages. Identified compromised npm packages have been taken down, and we continue to work with the npm team. Microsoft continues to investigate this attack and will publish updates as more information is available.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

@MsftSecIntel The Internet Computer Protocol can help with these sorta attacks.

https://t.co/Mod3yJNlkQ

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

Not using the Internet Computer Protocol is also arguably a national security risk.

We're getting to a point where critical software, data, and infrastructure need to live in tamper-resistant environments, not endlessly mutable Web2 systems held together by trust, credentials, and package registries.

This attack is a good example.

A compromised package gets published, a developer installs it, a hidden preinstall hook executes, credentials are stolen, and the attack spreads.

Could malicious code still be deployed on ICP?

 Yeah.

But ICP changes the trust model and architecture entirely. 

Code can be deployed as immutable canisters, making silent post-deployment modification impossible. Instead of trusting mutable package registries, centralized infrastructure, and a maze of credentials, critical components can be hosted in a verifiable protocol environment.

Then you can layer additional controls on top:

• https://t.co/9ZomqMvWCv for multi-party approval workflows instead of a single maintainer or CI key pushing updates.

• Threshold cryptography and VetKeys to reduce credential exposure and single points of failure.

• Tamper-resistant execution where code and state are protected by the protocol itself.

ICP doesn’t magically makes malware impossible.

Attacks like this succeed because modern software supply chains are built on fragile trust assumptions, centralized infrastructure, and credential sprawl.

ICP reduces those assumptions and raises the cost of compromise.

At some point we need to stop asking how to patch these systems and start asking whether the architecture itself needs to change.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

Not using the Internet Computer Protocol is a national security risk for any nation relying heavily on Big Tech infrastructure.

Why?

Because most cloud infrastructure is controlled by a handful of companies that are subject to laws like the U.S. CLOUD Act, which can require U.S.-based providers to disclose data under certain legal processes, even when that data belongs to foreign organizations or is stored outside the United States. For governments, critical infrastructure, and sensitive industries, that's a legitimate sovereignty concern.

Then there's the security side.

Most cyberattacks today target the complexity of Web2: servers, APIs, cloud credentials, databases, package registries, IAM systems, and countless other attack surfaces.

ICP dramatically reduces that complexity.

No traditional servers to manage.
Far fewer moving parts.
Far fewer attack surfaces.
Tamper-resistant code and data protected by the protocol itself.

Nothing is perfectly secure, but reducing complexity and central points of failure is one of the most effective security improvements you can make.

Then add sovereignty and resiliency.

Applications and data deployed on ICP are controlled by their owners, not a cloud provider. The network is decentralized, replicated across independent nodes, and designed to continue operating without relying on a single company.

For critical systems like healthcare, banking, government services, and national infrastructure, those properties matter.

Relying entirely on centralized cloud infrastructure is one of the biggest risks there are.

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

Dear ICP community, the Internet Computer has now been running strong for 5 years 👏👏👏

Here is a celebratory preview of ICP "cloud engines," the sovereign frontier cloud technology the network shall soon provide from https://t.co/D5Dfj44BmO.

Main points:

— Cloud engines enable anyone to spin up their own sovereign frontier cloud. The technology involves an extraordinary inventive step, in which cloud is created from a mathematically secure network of nodes. The nodes run as part of the Internet Computer network (https://t.co/ptsshOm9nj) but are selected and configured by the cloud engine's owner.

— The frontier cloud provided by engines is strongly focused on enabling AI agents to build and update online applications and services for us. The world is changing fast, and nearly all new online apps and services are already being built with the help of AI, and thus cloud engines target the future of cloud.

— Software hosted on cloud engines is tamperproof, which means that it is immune to infrastructure hacks, because it runs inside a mathematically secure network protocol, rather than on computers directly. This means that AI agents, and those building with them, don't need to have a security team in the loop, or to trust someone else's security team. This is crucial, because in the future, non technical people will demand the freedom to build with full automation — where they just need to issue instructions to AI about what to build, and don't need to worry about anything or anyone else. Of course, apps and services running on engines are also vastly safer from the new breed of hacker being enabled by frontier AI.

(The cloud engines themselves are also "tamperproof." Even if a hacker gains physical access to some portion of a cloud engine's nodes, and can make arbitrary changes, the computations and data of the hosted apps and services cannot be corrupted or interrupted so long as the network's fault bounds aren't exceeded. The recent hack of Vercel, a major cloud platform, which gave hackers access to the apps it hosted, provides additional perspective on the importance of this advantage.)

— Software hosted on cloud engines is guaranteed to run, so long as a sufficient number of the engine's nodes are running. This means that AI can build applications and services without the need to have a human systems admin team constantly tinkering with the underlying platform to keep it running, which is again crucial, because in the future, non technical people will expect the freedom to use AI to build without the support of others.

— New frontier programming language technology, in the form of the Motoko language developed by Caffeine Labs, leverages seminal "orthogonal persistence" technology that unifies program logic and data to deliver further unlocks for AI (Motoko is the first computer language being developed that targets agents that are writing software rather than humans engineers per se). Nowadays, AI can build and update production apps at a prodigious rate, even at the speed of conversation. But it can also make mistakes, and there's a risk that an update it creates might be "lossy" in the sense it causes some transformed data to be lost. Again, in this new world, it's both undesirable and impractical for everyone to have to have a systems admin team on-hand to detect lossy updates and roll them back, but Motoko provides a solution: it can detect new software updates are lossy before they are applied, reducing potentially catastrophic errors by AI to harmless coding retries.

— Software hosted on cloud engines is "serverless" but unlike traditional serverless software, directly it directly incorporates data through "orthogonal persistence." Another key purpose is simplify backend software logic and fuel the modeling power of AI by increasing abstraction (sorry for the technical language!!!). Put simply, this enables AI to produce more sophisticated backends, faster, and at dramatically lower costs, as measured by the number AI API tokens consumed during coding. (Tip for the technical: orthogonal persistence is a new paradigm where "the program is the database," and data lives inside program variables, which is possible because it's as if hosted software runs forever in persistent memory).

— An expanding database of skills at https://t.co/lloVYiGYs8 shall make it possible to develop and directly deploy apps and services to your cloud engines directly from Claude Code, Perplexity, Codex and other AI platforms. Further, your account on https://t.co/IfQrVovF3L can be connected, so that new apps and updates created through conversation automatically appear hosted from your cloud engine. In the future, R&D is going to be very seamless. You converse with AI, and your secure and unstoppable apps or services are created or updated. Cloud engines are designed to directly support this "self-writing cloud" future where we can work hands-free.

— Tech sovereignty is becoming a huge issue worldwide, with governments and corporations seeking to create sovereign tech stacks owing to geopolitical tensions. Increasingly, people are realizing that tech provided by foreign nations can come with hidden backdoors and kills switches, from the base platform, right up through hosted apps and services. ICP technology is open source, and those building on ICP using AI own their own source code. When you have the source code, you can verify that there are no backdoors, and when you own the source code thanks to AI, you can update it at will, freeing you from vendor lock-in. But cloud engines take sovereignty much further...

— You create a cloud engine by selecting the nodes that will be combined. You can choose the class of nodes used, and their number, but more importantly, you can choose who operates the nodes, and where they are located. Almost any configuration is possible, because the Internet Computer scales the security privileges afforded to hosted software within the network according to configuration (software hosted on cloud engines can directly interoperate with software on other engines and traditional subnets, but base restrictions are applied according to security rules). A cloud engine can be created within a region such as Europe, to comply with regs such as GDPR, or completely within a sovereign state like Switzerland or Pakistan. But cloud engines go further still...

— Sovereignty is also about freedom from vendor lock-in. Cloud engines are essentially ICP (Internet Computer Protocol) network configurations, and this means the underlying compute nodes they combine can be swapped out without interrupting their hosted apps and services. This is a big deal. In addition, cloud engines now support nodes that are instances running on Big Tech's clouds, in addition to nodes that are dedicated specialized hardware, as per the Gen I and Gen II nodes that dominate the Internet Computer today. For example, it is possible to have an engine running across different AWS data centers, say, and then reconfigure the engine to run across a mixture of AWS, Google, Azure and Hetzner for even more resilience, without the users of hosted apps and services noticing a thing. That's true freedom.

— Sovereign AI is becoming increasingly important too, and cloud engines allow special "AI nodes" to be added to them, so that hosted software can perform inference on hardware provisioned by the owner from a location the owner has selected. Even though the AI nodes are only accessible within the cloud engine, they can still benefit from the forthcoming Internet Intelligence Gateway (IG), which will make it possible to validate inference performed on key frontier open weights LLMs, even when the inference is performed on completely independent AI clouds. When the results of inference are received, this technology can verify that neither the prompt+context (input) nor the inference result (output) have been modified, and that the results were produced by the precise LLM expected. This ensures that AI clouds don't cheat by running inference on cheaper models than are being paid for, and bad actors aren't modifying the inputs or outputs to surreptitiously insert advertising into results, say, or change facts, or insert malware when code is being generated. What's super cool about this technology is the cost of the verification is scalable. A very valuable additional security can be achieved with only 1-2% of extra cost.

— Scaling apps and services when they hit capacity limits is another thorny problem that cloud engines help the world address. Engines make scaling possible without rewriting or reconfiguring software. The query workload capacity of hosted software can be horizontally scaled simply by adding new nodes to an engine, and nodes can also be added in geographical proximity to demand. Meanwhile, update workload capacity can first be scaled-up by swapping an engine's nodes out for the next class up, and then when no larger class of node is available, horizontally scaled-out by "splitting" the engine into two, which doubles available capacity. (Technical tip: horizontally scaling update capacity by splitting engines requires multi-canister architectures).

— For those who have been following how Caffeine builds apps that can efficiently store large numbers of files, I should mention that apps built on cloud engines will also support the new ICP Blob Storage cloud network (since cloud engines currently have up to about 3 TB of memory, which apps storing large amounts of files can easily exceed). We are also working on allowing blob storage nodes to be added to cloud engines, to enable sovereign mass blob storage within an engine, similarly to how AI nodes can be added currently.

— Lastly, but certainly not least, I should mention that cloud engines are multi-blockchain capable, and ready for digital assets, thanks to the clever math at their core. For example, an e-commerce service built on a cloud engine can securely accept and custody stablecoin payments, or a multi-chain DEX could be hosted. Further, engines can support software autonomy (software orchestrated and controlled by other autonomous software, in a decentralized way) and can themselves be orchestrated by SNS technology, and thus run autonomously too.

Today, though, the focus is on *mainstream* cloud. This year, the cloud industry will generate approximately one trillion dollars in revenue. That number is already huge, but is expected to grow to two trillion dollars by 2030.

After years of continuous development, which have seen more than $500m spent on R&D, the Internet Computer network is now tacking directly toward this mainstream cloud market with cloud engine technology.

In their first version, cloud engines are not meant to be a cloud panacea. For example, currently they are not ideal for working with big data. You should use something like DataBricks for that.

Cloud engines are carefully targeted at enabling AI to produce traditional online applications and services, including SaaS, in a safer and more productive way, which represents a new market segment with tremendous potential. Of course, DFINITY will continue to work relentlessly to push forward ICP's capabilities, so expect further developments.

It's worth mentioning that this cloud segment isn't just about creating new apps and services using AI, it's also about replacing legacy systems and apps built on super expensive SaaS services. Caffeine Labs is working to produce technology (Caffeine Snorkel) that can study an enterprise's legacy systems and app built on SaaS, create replacement systems and apps, and migrate the data, while supporting key stakeholders through the process over email and chat, with full automation. Thus the legacy systems and SaaS markets shall also be addressed by cloud engines.

Zooming out, and reasoning in a more metaphysical way, we believe, as we always have, that there is room for a new kind of cloud created by mathematical networks, that provides seminal advances in the fields of security and resilience, as well as true sovereignty and freedom from lock-in. That this same technology, with the help of additional technologies like orthogonal persistence and Motoko, enables AI to build for us without the need for so much oversight, and to create more backend sophistication while consuming fewer AI API tokens, enables ICP to bring game-changing advances to the world.

Cloud engines will work synergistically with the Intelligence Gateway, which will enable apps and services running on engines to seamlessly leverage AI, wherever that AI is running, while providing verifiability at extremely low cost for open weights frontier models.

We believe that cloud engines represent an inflection point in the storied history of the Internet Computer project, and I'm very proud to be sharing the details with you on the network's fifth birthday 💪

I'll be back with more news soon!!

[Pierre @PierreSamaties]

I've seen it today, its mind blowing.

[dom | icp @dominic_w]

Soon I will demonstrate how AI can be "inside" an arbitrary ICP app, service or website built using the latest Motoko, understanding all its data, analysing it any way you want, and taking actions, without need for one special line of code. Insane and groundbreaking.

[Fabio @Zero2HeroZombie]

$ICP did generate 88% more Revenue than $SUI in May.
Meanwhile, SUI had almost twice as much Expenses ($5.2M VS $9.9M)

ICP has a 5.4X lower Market Cap.

Make it make sense.

[Pierre @PierreSamaties]

Looking forward to contributing to the inaugural meeting of the Blockchain Advisory Group convened by @UNDP at Proof of Talk 2026.

[ICPsimp ☁️∞ @ICPsimp]

@DBCrypt0 Lol